>Hi all, > >Here I am, stirring up controversy again... > >In my *humble* opinion, most QLs are at end of life... We all know Nasta's > been working on Goldfire for an age and a half
Yes, and that's speaking in geological terms :-) > So, the room (still!) exists for a low cost platform to run SMSQ/E. By low > cost I mean under 200 ukp. This should include all the basic interfaces > one would expect. Mouse and keyboard, IDE, floppy, CF, memory expansion > possibilities, video output, etc. > ... > So what are the chances that we could sit around this virtual table and > throw out some ideas for a primarily "low cost" platform, of the type that > would be cheap and easy to assemble, use standard components as much as > possible, needn't be elegant but must be reliable and have other QL > qoalities (low power, no noise, very easy to use, cute black case ;) I would still lean towards the 68SZ328. On the plus side: - effectively a 66MHz 68000 (and could possibly be made to run a bit faster than that), hence fully compatible with current SMSQ sources and needs no emulation of anything - essentially could work with modified SMSQ for GC/SGC - 'connect the dots' system design - has everything on the chip and interfaces with everything else with, in most cases, 0 glue logic. In particular things that every system needs to have, such as SDRAM, Flash, peripherals... this all means that designing the hardware is easy and quick. - Has a TON of on-board peripherals (I think the only thing missing is a floppy controller, IDE and such are basically simple decoders in this scenario, very easy to do) - including an LCD interface which does mono or color (4, 16, 256 and 65536) which could be made to operate at VGA like resolutions and with memory layouts compatible with Aurora and Qx0, and also drive a regular VGA monitor. TV is a problem but there are chips that do VGA to TV if the feature is really needed (which I think it's not). It also has a USB slave interface so can be linked as a peripheral to a USB hub. It also interfaces to MMC cards and Sony memory sticks (CF etc. are to be handled through IDE). It has AD converters for a touch screen (which we could probably use for something else) and a DA converter that is capable of producing sound, though only in the voice range (no fancy CD quality stuff here). What all of this amounts to is that one could put all of the existing (and some not yet existing) features of a well appointed QL onto a standard euro size board (or even smaller). RAM is currently cheap enough that one could simply stick on the maximum possible size and leave it there (I believe that's 64MB but there are tricks to expand this as the internal addressing is 32 bit). The negatives: 1) It is after all a 68000 - even if it runs at 66MHz. The bus is 16-bit and there is no cache etc. It does go a bit faster per clock than a regular 68000 mainly because it uses a more optimized memory interface. Even so, do not expect miraculous speeds - maybe 2x SGC. 2) Video goes up to 1024x512 max and 65536 colors, but is in practice is limited by the total data rate from memory, as it's a shared memory system (like the original QL). This means that higher resolutions and color depth result in a slowdown of memory access for the CPU. On the other hand, I've done some quick calculations and I think it would be easily do better than the Aurora, plus it has a virtual screen feature (where the actual screen can be larger than the displayed sresolution) and can drive TFT panels directly. 3) The chip is rather difficult to solder since it's a tiny BGA package with several hundred pins, but this is not really a huge problem. >Nasta, what do you need to get GF finished and out there? A genie in a lamp so I can wish away the cr*p that is going to happen in the next two months as I prepare to move and then move back to Croatia. More about that privately, if you want - or you can give me a ring. Nasta
